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Building Peace

QUNO Geneva understands peacebuilding as both the development of human and institutional capacity for resolving conflicts without violence, and the transformation of the conditions that generate destructive conflict. Therefore, in this latter sense, it must include work to prevent destructive conflict.

QUNO's December 2017 issue of the Geneva Reporter newsletter is now available online.

The latest issue features: a brief overview on our recent work on sustaining peace and food security, a introduction to the importance of agricultural biodiversity, developments on the right to conscientious objection to military service, news about our recent climate action publication "A Negotiator's Tookit," and a QUNO Q&A with 2006 Geneva Summer School participant Tankiso Phori.

The Geneva Peacebuilding Platform held a briefing for diplomats on Human Rights and Peacebuilding on 15th February, which QUNO organised, moderated and presented. This briefing drew on the work QUNO has been doing on human rights, peacebuilding and sustaining peace through our Peace and Disarmament and Human Rights and Refugees Programmes, and in close collaboration with our colleagues at QUNO New York. The briefing session aimed to provide useful background to diplomats ahead of the Mainstreaming Panel on the contribution of human rights to peacebuilding at the Human Rights Council on 27 February.

During the briefing session, Diane Hendrick and the other panelists illustrated areas in which human rights interacted with peacebuilding processes and approaches, and how human rights can be mainstreamed throughout the peacebuilding work of the UN system, including on the ground. A key aim was to present the concept of “sustaining peace” in which peacebuilding is understood as a process that takes place (and needs to be supported) before during and after conflict, as reflected in recent UN resolutions on the UN peacebuilding architecture. QUNO underlined that economic, social, and cultural rights are integral to addressing the root causes of destructive conflict.

For further information please refer below to our Handout on Human Rights and International Peace and Security.

Related Areas of Work

QUNO will be undertaking a project collaboration with Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) and Lancaster University Law School. The project titled ‘Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR) and Sustaining Peace - Developing New Insights into Peacebuilding’ is partially funded by Lancaster University Faculty of Social Science and Lancaster University Law School and will run until July 2017.

This impact and knowledge exchange project aims to enhance knowledge and understanding of the role of economic, social and cultural rights (ECSRs) in sustaining peace. The idea is to exchange knowledge and share practices and experiences of the use of such rights within the peacebuilding and human rights communities and across disciplines to develop innovative practice. Two knowledge exchange workshops will be held the first in Geneva in February 2017 and the second in Lancaster in July 2017.

Related Areas of Work

Geneva Peace Week, which was held from the 7th to the 11th November, is a collective initiative facilitated by the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG), the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, and the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform in collaboration the Swiss Confederation.

This week-long event underlined that each and every person and institution has a role to play in building peace and highlighted that peace promotion occurs in many different contexts and cuts across disciplines and sectors. In this sense, Geneva Peace Week is an attempt to break down the divisions which tend to characterize the international community and can limit more creative responses.

This was an exciting week for QUNO, as we co-organised and participated in a number of events, including the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform Annual Conference, which this year focused on the war economy in Syria and the necessity to address these political economy aspects of the conflict as part of the process of peacemaking and peacebuilding. It was a week of engagement and opportunity for QUNO and other non-governmental-organizations, UN agencies and academic and research institutions that connected with each other and shared ideas about good practices in sustaining peace and prevention in relation to other areas of work such as business, human rights, food security etc.

Related Areas of Work

In this video, excerpted from a longer film shown at the Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) World Plenary Meeting held in Peru in January 2016, Diane Hendrick explains the work of our Peace & Disarmament programme.

The Peace and Disarmament programme grows out of a long Quaker history of working for peace, understanding that this means more than the absence of overt violence and has fundamentally to do with social and economic justice and political participation. Where these are denied, the roots of violence can be found.

Related Areas of Work

The Quaker United Nations Office and the NYU Center on International Cooperation (CIC) hosted an informal discussion at Quaker House on lessons learned in funding for peace. The event involved representatives from the UN, Member States and civil society, and sought to identify how such lessons might be reflected in the outcome document, the Addis Ababa Accord, of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, in July 2015.

Many participants noted the imperative need to provide mechanisms to fund the promotion of peaceful and inclusive societies. Funding Goal 16 will be critical to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and will require flexible, risk-tolerant and coordinated approaches that will promote resilience by addressing the root causes of violence and instability, reducing humanitarian need and building institutions in a sustainable and inclusive manner.

Related Areas of Work

QUNO played a large role in bringing eighty CSOs to engage with the Second Ministerial Review Conference of the Geneva Declaration in November 2011.

QUNO worked to ensure that the programming experience of civil society organisations (CSO’s) was included in the understanding of what is currently being done to tackle the problem of armed violence around the world.